USAGE: writing the date in Chinese

The subject line says it all.  How does one write out the date when
writing Chinese?

If I were guessing, I would write out today's date as 2008 (in some
set of numerals), followed by the glyph for "year" (Mandarin "nian2"),
followed by 8, followed by the glyph for "month"/"moon" (Mandarin
"yue4"?), followed by 22, followed by the glyph for "sun"/"day"
(Mandarin "tai4yang2"?):

2008 年 08 月 22 日

or, to use the native numerals:

二千八年八月廿二日

So please correct me if I'm wrong about that.  But even if I'm right,
then suppose I were to switch to the traditional lunisolar calendar.
That introduces two complications:

First there's the whole "how do I designate the year?" question.  If I
use the non-traditional continuous numbering in common use in the West
and say that this is year 4705, that would presumably follow the same
pattern, though I wonder where an era marker would go if I wanted to
be explicit about the fact that I'm using (one of the) Huang-di eras.
But if I wanted to say that it's the stem-branch year wù-zǐ, would I
just write 戊子年?

Second: leap months.  How would I refer to, say, "leap month 5" as
opposed to the preceding non-leap month 5?

Any help appreciated.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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